If you’ve ever played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Dark Heresy, or any of the Witcher games, you know there’s a distinctly grimdark, gritty tone to those games. By concentrating on certain themes, you can evoke some of that depth and despair in your own games—and raise the stakes of the campaign in the process. If you’ve enjoyed grimdark books and are looking to expand into that genre, you can adapt this advice to your fiction projects as well.

But GM beware: it’s a fine line to walk between simply punishing your players and making a game with greater challenges and rewards. The key is to keep the pendulum swinging between light and dark, hope and fear. And to keep your players coming back, they’ll need to have seductive opportunities to succeed or make a positive impact on the world, even if they can’t save all of it.

Whether you’re pulling together a one-shot for a gaming convention or an adventure for your home campaign, sometime between when you wrangle a group and when you start playing, you have to develop the actual adventure! There are many components that go into roleplaying game adventures—encounters and maps, non-player characters and stat blocks, the list goes on—and tackling everything at once can be daunting. If you’re not sure where to start, the following five steps will help you organize your ideas and make sure you cover all your bases to create an engaging scenario that gives the players agency to determine their characters’ fate.

Step 1: Come up with A Hook or Premise

Start by coming up with the basic idea that forms the underpinning of the scenario and guides the rest of your prep. Ask yourself, what cool thing does this adventure revolve around? What element of the adventure gets you the most excited and helps you differentiate it from the myriad adventures you’ve played in or run before? The cool thing could be a location, a magic item, an NPC, or a specific reveal. Alternatively, you could explore what-if scenarios that interest you. What if a sentient magic item had gone crazy? What if we got to explore the temple shown in Jedha, and why would we go there? What if the pretty soldiers from Sailor Moon were more like a yankii street gang in a post-apocalyptic NeoTokyo?

Feel free to brainstorm ideas surrounding that cool thing and write a half page or so of description to give yourself the down-low on the focus of your adventure. You’ll probably use that information later when you devise the characters, obstacles, and world that are connected to it.

As you’re brainstorming these ideas, don’t forget to consider why you’re creating this adventure and the specific requirements or restraints you’re dealing with: Where will you play? How long do you have to play? Who will be playing? What tone or age rating will the adventure have? What are the conventions or tropes that surround the genre, and how can I play with my audience’s expectations?

The Id DM recently invited me on his podcast, Ego Check, an interview podcast series hosted by a licensed psychologist, Michael Mallen, Ph.D. The podcast delves into a variety of game types (e.g., tabletop roleplaying games, board games, video games) from a psychological perspective. Dr. Mallen has been interviewing members of the gaming community for articles on his blog, The Id DM, since 2011 and is now posting these interviews for others to enjoy. Check out his blog as well as the other fantastic episodes with other guests from the gaming industry and beyond!

Katrina Ostrander of Fantasy Flight Games on Anxiety and Being a Woman in the Gaming Industry

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So you’ve got a collection of guides for game masters, an arsenal’s worth of GM tips, and a group of players who are happy to be your test subjects. In order to become a great GM, all you have to do is clock in ten thousand hours of practicing those techniques in order to become great at gamemastering, right?

Not so fast.

According to the research, simply reading a book, watching a video, or listening to a podcast and giving those concepts a try isn’t going to make you better. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool details the process, as backed up by data, of how to get good at just about anything. You have to apply your newfound knowledge with practice, but you have to practice the right way.

If you just do something repetitively for a long time, you’re not actually likely to become an expert at it. You need to try, fail, recalibrate, and try again. In this book, the authors discuss the method that’s proven to work for the world’s top athletes, musicians, surgeons, chess grandmasters, and more: it’s called deliberate practice, and it’s designed to help you create stronger mental representations.

Mental representations (or ways of thinking about something) are what separate the good GMs from the great ones. Well-developed mental representations enable GMs to juggle multiple considerations such as plot twists, NPCs, and pacing in their heads all at once: they’ve trained themselves to be consciously thinking of those all those things and more at the right times during game. Mental representations also give GMs a model for predicting how different rulings or story choices will play out at the table, and for making the right call when presented with the players’ unexpected plans or unanticipated dice rolls.

Here’s what the authors of Peak say you have to do in order to practice deliberately and forge those mental representations.

Inspired to try your hand at running a new roleplaying game? Approaching an unfamiliar ruleset can be daunting, but with the right tools, you can learn the mechanics more quickly and easily, making for a smoother first session when you finally have a chance to play! Here are my five tips for teaching yourself a new RPG system.

Tip #1: Equip Yourself with a Beginner Game, Starter Set, or Quickstart Product

Publishers have tried to make it easier than ever to pick up and start playing their games. Rather than starting out by reading the whole core rulebook cover to cover, you might want to check your friendly local gaming store, DriveThruRPG.com, or the publisher’s website to see whether an introductory product is available.

Beginner games and starter sets are meant to ease new players and game masters into the rules through play, which makes learning a new system fun and low-stress. Many physical beginner products come with everything you need to play the game, from dice to maps and handouts to pre-generated characters. The rulebooks are condensed, so they don’t take as long to read, and the adventures are designed to highlight the essential aspects of the rules.

So-called “quickstarts” tend to be PDFs or small booklets that serve a similar purpose, although you might need to add your own dice or print/photocopy your own character sheets. You might also look for digital downloads of Free RPG Day offerings from past years, which typically contain quickstart versions of the rules along with a short adventure.